The Mediterranean sun lazily shone on the pier as a passenger ship sailing from Seville, Spain to Trieste slowly approached the harbor. After the surrender of Italy, the Austro-Hungarian navy had taken full control of the Mediterranean, and the British warships and merchant ships flying the St. George flag were gone, and most of the ships sailing in this area were merchant ships of neutral countries.

Ding Xudong and Wang Huanzhang, military attachés of the Republic of China Legation in Vienna, stood on the wharf to greet a group of newly graduated military cadets from China, seven graduates of the Army University, 43 junior officers who graduated from the Baoding Military Academy, and more than 20 international students from the Yantai Naval Academy and the Beiyang Aviation School. The two of them really couldn't understand what the hell the hell the newly reinstated deputy army chief in Beijing was doing.

Ye Quan walked down the gangway with a suitcase and a large group of classmates, and thankfully, after nearly three months at sea, he finally arrived at his destination. Their group of military academy classmates who voluntarily applied to go to the border defense country when they graduated embarked on a journey to study in Europe in a daze, and due to the cut off of the shipping route, the group could only go to South America first, and then to Spain, circumnavigating most of the world, and finally arrived in Austria-Hungary.

"What the hell did the War Office send us to Europe for?" This is the question that lingers in the mind of every officer, if he is going to Europe to inspect or watch the war, the War Department should not hide this matter, and it is not allowed to wear military uniforms or reveal his military identity along the way. The guys who graduated from the Army University must know, but they refused to reveal the details, only vaguely feeling that they were going to Europe to lead troops.

Goes? What are you kidding, those foreign devils are willing to listen to our commands?

Anyway, they are now regular officers, which is better than those who return to the province after graduation, and some of them may not be able to find suitable positions in the province. The Baoding Army Military Academy can be said to be the only regular military academy in China today, and the graduates of the army halls in the provinces can only be non-commissioned officers, and their status cannot be compared with the graduates of the Baoding Military Academy.

The graduates of the Baoding Military Academy all have good military qualities, and they themselves are outstanding among the graduates of army primary schools in various provinces, and they are valued by the northern government and the military authorities of the provinces in terms of military education and staff operations. Since the day of its establishment, the purpose of the Baoding Military Academy has been to train professional soldiers for the country, and it has flaunted that "soldiers take it as their duty to defend their homes and defend the country and obey orders" and "soldiers do not care about politics as noble", thus forming the characteristics of professional soldiers for the students of Baoding Military Academy.

The graduates of the Baoding Military Academy can be said to be the most military students in Chinese history, absolutely obeying orders and not participating in political affairs, and most of the students of the Baoding Military Academy can abide by this military discipline.

Of course, young people are always full of enthusiasm and ideals, and when they graduated, Ye Quan, Xia Wei, Bai Chongxi and other enthusiastic young people took the initiative to apply to go to Mongolia or Xinjiang to defend the border, but what was unexpected, the War Department gave special preferential treatment to nearly 400 students in the second and third phases of the military academy who took the initiative to go to the frontier, and selected nearly 100 of them to study in Europe.

There are nearly 1,800 graduates of the Baoding Military Academy in these two phases, but they are the only ones who have become the lucky ones, which makes those students who come from good backgrounds and whose families have arranged positions for them in the army regret.

Along the way, the passenger liner was intercepted and interrogated twice by British warships, and the British sailors were very rude to the Chinese, but they were very polite to even the Germans who were at war, which made these officers and students more aware of the current situation of the country's weakness and bullying, and also aroused everyone's patriotism.

As the saying goes: If you don't go to a foreign country, you don't know how to be patriotic.

Indeed, there is some truth in the fact that such strong national feelings cannot be felt at all in China, and the confrontation and conflict between nations, races, and civilizations cannot be understood without personal experience.

In the Adriatic, the cadets saw a fleet of battleships that passed by passenger liners, and gave them a first-hand experience of the huge gap between the poor Motherland and the Western powers. Compared with these giant warships, the Beiyang Navy's largest "Haitian" is like a small miscellaneous fish on the sea.

Strengthening the army and strengthening the country has become everyone's deepest wish.

The leader of the team was Wu Guangxin from the War Department, who was a relative of General Chief Duan, who turned out to be the deputy head of the Model Officer Corps, and had a few polite words with Ding Xudong and Wang Huanzhang on the dock, and several cars pulled them to the Navy Hotel, which was not far from the dock. The graduates of Lu University sat in cars, while junior officers like Ye Quan and others who graduated from the Baoding Military Academy got on two buses.

Now, at last, they knew their mission in Europe: to train and command the more than 8,000 Chinese workers in Austria-Hungary.

This is the plan that Li Haidun and Xu Shuzheng discussed at the beginning.

However, it was relatively easy for Britain and France to recruit laborers in China because of their control of the seas, but it was not easy for Xu Shuzheng to send the laborers recruited for Austria-Hungary to Germany and Austria-Hungary. The British were so strict at sea that they had to divert to South America and make a detour from neutral Spain to Europe.

With the financial support of Li Haidun, it took Xu Shuzheng nearly half a year to send less than 8,000 laborers from China to Austria-Hungary.

Now, these Chinese workers are housed in six logistics camps, which are militarized, and they work as porters in normal times and occasionally undergo some military training.

Commanding these men by European standards is equivalent to a reinforced infantry division, requiring about 400 officers, but it is clear that such a requirement cannot be met at home. Xu Shuzheng scraped together to send more than 80 officers from China, and it was in the name of studying in Europe that he was able to attract so many people to sign up.

With only such a small number of officers, only a dozen officers could be assigned to each camp of Chinese workers, plus the military advisers sent by the Austro-Hungarian side: a few officers and a dozen non-commissioned officers, so we could only make do with it first.

Ye Quan, Bai Chongxi, Yao Cheng and others were assigned to the Ukrainian camp of Amorim, which was close to the front line, and the camp of the Chinese workers' camp was mixed with the Austro-Hungarian military camp, and the occasional cannon fire could be heard from a distance. As usual, hundreds of Chinese workers were training on the camp's training grounds, while most of the others were delivering supplies to the front line. There are more than 1,700 Chinese workers in the Amorim camp, who take turns training in the camp.

Now, these officers who have just graduated from the military academy have become the supreme commander here, but when those foremen introduced their identities to these Chinese workers, Ye Quan could clearly feel that these Chinese workers had a trace of hostility and distrust towards them.

A tricky matter, how can these peasants be trained into qualified soldiers?

This gave Ye Quan and them a headache.

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